In this project, a catheter which has a very small circular array of ultrasonic transducers on the tip is inserted inside the coronary artery. The computer processes the resulting image to determine the lumen-intima boundary and the media-adventitial boundary. Once one boundary is found, the catheter is withdrawn a small amount, and the process repeated. In this way, the boundaries may be tracked, and a 3-D rendering of the artery produced. The tracking is complicated by the fact that cardiac motion causes radical displacements of the catheter between frames. Numerous publications and a licencing agreement have resulted.
In This sequence of intracoronary ultrasound images, the medial-adventicial boundary has been found and fit with a curve. The circle in the center of the image is the catheter. These curves maybe interpolated through the third dimension to construct a 3-D representation of the arterial wall.